Dataconomy » Weekly Newsletter

I recently helped out at an access initiative for Oxford University, and the experience got me thinking about how we could bridge the state-private divide in Oxbridge and the Russell Group schools. According to Professor Les Ebdon, director of the Office for Fair Access (OFFA), the biggest challenge facing fair admissions right now is that “many teenagers from poorer backgrounds do not see Russell Group institutions as suitable for them”. Many access programs try to combat this psychology of inhibition, but often to little avail. For example, the scheme that I was involved in offers high-achieving students from non-selective state schools a chance to hear for themselves what Oxford admissions really is about, but a problem lies in this approach: since its demographic pool targets teacher-nominated students who have already...
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LinkedIn has rolled out its very own web-scale real-time analytics engine, dubbed Pinot. Designed and built at LinkedIn, Pinot will allow sifting through immense troves of data in real-time across a wide variety of products. Earlier, LinkedIn used generic storage systems like Oracle (RDBMS) and Voldemort (Key Value Storage), for their analytics products, writes Praveen Neppalli Naga, Engineering Manager at LinkedIn. However, inspiration towards development of Penot came with the realisation of wanting infrastructure to support high read QPS with low latencies, current systems lacking OLAP specialization, exponential increment of data in “breadth and depth” and the widening needs across the company thus prompting the setting up of a centralised system. “LinkedIn is a data driven company and product usage data is critical to the product management teams and they...
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Cisco predicts that by 2020, we’ll have 50 billion connected devices. To put the in perspective, if current population projections are accurate, that’s between six seven connected devices for every person on the planet. We’ve also seen increasing amounts of cities- from Chicago to New Jersey to Adelaide- getting smarter, and making data capture and utility a priortiy. In the latest installment of our expert interviews about the future of the Internet of Things, we discuss the promise of these smart cities with RF Code‘s VP of Worldwide Marketing & Strategic Partnerships, Richard Jenkins. As a leading environmental monitoring and asset management solutions provider, RF Code have been working within the RFID and Internet of Things space for over a decade, and are uniquely placed to offer insights into what...
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Ecommerce analytics startup Qubit has secured $26 million in Series B funding on Monday, with Accel Partners leading the round. Original investors Salesforce Ventures and Balderton Capital, also participated. The funding will be used to expand Qubit’s US and European operations and development of the ongoing product innovation pipeline. Qubit specialises in tools which assist online retailers to monitor and optimize sales through A/B testing and user centric personalization of content. Mark Choueke, the global communications director at Qubit, wrote in a blog post, “To receive backing from such experienced heavyweights in the market; to have their confidence that what we do and how we do it is worth investing in is amazing. ” “It shows us that others are seeing what we have known for a long time: that...
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Target can tell when its shoppers are pregnant. Facebook conducts social experiments on us to see if we are emotionally vulnerable. How? Data intelligence! All this is possible because we share detailed information about ourselves with companies in almost every aspect of our life. When we browse on the internet, we leave behind a trail of our online activity that companies utilize to improve our browsing experiences and offer recommendations based on our interests. When we shop, we give information about our consumption patterns through loyalty cards as well as credit and debit cards. Sudden shifts in these patterns are not regular but when they occur, retailers can deduce changes in our life such as marriage, child expectancy and so on. Our phones and tablets can keep track of our...
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Data management specialists Peaxy have made their signature product, the Peaxy Hyperfiler generally available today. The general principle behind the Hyperfiler software is making massive amounts of unstructured data across complex data architectures immediately accessible and manageable. The Hyperfiler product was built with a particular industrial pain point in mind. The explosion in unstructured data means that industries have access to more data than ever, but managing this data has become challenging. According to Peaxy’s website, it’s estimated “only 10% of the data can be accessed while 90% sits idle and untapped”. The mission objective of the Peaxy Hyperfiler is to give clear and constant access to all of the data, across extensive product lifecycles of over 50 years. One of the main reasons so much of company’s data has...
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I’m Alexandre Passant, and I’m co-founder of Music & Data Geeks. We’re a music-tech company based in Dogpatch Labs Dublin, Ireland. In particular, we’re building seevl, a music meta-data API to help music services make sense of their data, provide recommendations to their users, and more. I’ve been working in data and Semantic Web technologies for about 10 years, first through a Ph.D., then as a Research Fellow in DERI, world’s largest “Web 3.0″ R&D lab, and now through the start-up. My goal is to make the Web more open and interconnected, bridging the gap between raw data (webpages) and knowledge (meta-data and structured connections), and then making sense of this data through recommendations, analytics, etc. Combining this with my passion for listening, playing and recoding music is what lead...
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Dataconomy » Upcoming Big Data Events

AI has been facing a PR problem. Too often AI has introduced itself as a misogynist, racist and sinister robot. Remember the Microsoft Twitter chatbot named Tay, who was learning to mimic online conversations, but then started to blur out the most offensive tweets? Think of tech companies creating elaborate

Meet investors, Blockchain and crypto enthusiasts, a talent pool of developers and programmers as they solve three Blockchain challenges over two days in Berlin. Here is why you should be a part of LongHash Cryptocon Vol2. Berlin has been recognised as the cryptocurrency capital of Europe for more than half